8.2 Million Removed From Labor Force Under Obama

The economic news in this country hasn’t been good throughout the Obama administration. Second quarter growth was just 1.3%, manufacturing orders and orders for durable goods are down substantially in recent months. QE1 and QE2 failed while QE3 is destined for failure. The Stimulus was a massive failure. Income is down $4,000 during the Obama years while prices are up. There are 48 million Americans on food stamps. If we blindly follow the government’s 7.8% unemployment claim, there are millions of unemployed Americans. If we subscribe to the U-6 unemployment model, the number of millions of unemployed Americans nearly doubles. The economic disaster has been sustained throughout Obama’s years.

The number of Americans in the workforce has barely increased during the last four years. We know that despite claims of 4 million jobs created, the fact is that the number of employed Americans is less than 300,000 more today than it was at the beginning of the recession. Couple this with recent claims from the government about the number of people in the workforce and the unemployment rate and the numbers don’t add up. The following chart was produced by Sen. Jeff Sessions, it demonstrates what the government has done with the unemployed during the last four years:

For every American added to the labor force over the last year, nearly 10 were added to the tally of people not in the labor force. That’s how the government came up with the 7.8% unemployment rate last month, they simply removed 350,000 people from the workforce. Unfortunately the numbers don’t mesh with reality. We need to create 150,000 jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. That is on average how many more people enter the workforce each month than leave it. In other words, we don’t have a sudden increase in retirements that explain these numbers. The government is simply removing people from the workforce to make the jobs market appear more stable and less of a problem than it really is.

One of the chief problems with the jobs report every month has been the small number of jobs created. We had a summer of less than 100,000 jobs created each month, September only saw 114,000 jobs created. Those numbers don’t keep up with population growth. Rather than count new people in the jobs market as unemployed, the government is shifting them into the ranks of people not in the job market. Then they don’t count as being unemployed, thus the unemployment rate drops. But it doesn’t actually drop, it actually increases because new members of the job market (usually young people) want jobs but cannot find employment.

One of the reasons Obama is having trouble whipping up enthusiasm among the young is because of the jobs market. The unemployment rate might not count young, new entrants into the job market as unemployed but the people they aren’t counting sure do feel unemployed. Believe it or not young people don’t want to live in their parents basement playing video games and wasting their lives away. They want to work, they want to be independent, they want their own home. Obama hasn’t worked out for them and they know it. It’s why fewer young people will go to the polls in three weeks and it’s why of those who do go to the polls a smaller percentage will vote for Obama. The government might fool people with a job into thinking unemployment is down to 7.8% but the government isn’t going to fool those who aren’t being counted and want jobs.